>>We have become increasingly vulgar.<<
Have we? I don't listen to rap, given my druthers, but I remember very seamy black entertainers from my youth. Moms Mabley, for one, was mighty raunchy. "Dirty blues" is another genre, "squeeze my lemon 'til the juice runs down my leg."
Coincidentally, Lenny Bruce's rap that starts "'to' is a preposition, 'come' is a verb" popped into my mind in the last day or two.
Over the last few hundred years, you could read all the porno you wanted as long as you read it in Greek or Latin. Plain English raunch was more censored because of the elitist point of view that it was not for the lower classes.
Between you and me, I think the lower classes indulged in all the raunch they wanted, take a look at the etchings by Hogarth.
My husband suggests you listen to "The Art of the Bawdy Song," Henry Purcell, et al., for example, "My man John had a thing that was long, My maid Mary had a thing that was hairy."
amazon.com
More musical (to my ears) than rap, but still it's about sex and drugs (alcohol and tobacco). |
